The Catholic Counter-Reformation

Point 107. Economic democracy is stateless

1. The dissolution of family ties and consequently of natural communities and traditional societies, under the pressure of individualism, leads inevitably to a total disaffection for even the most perfect political community, the work of the time-honoured virtues of a whole people – the nation. Societies that are based on profit, production and consumerism are societies without frontiers, without laws, and without a destiny.

The monstrous science of economics and in particular modern “ political economics ” so-called, studiously ignores the most important political reality, the vital fact of the nation and its peculiar, almost infinite, capacity for security, order and cohesion… Such systems invincibly tend to discredit patriotic sentiment and, in its calculations, methodically cut contemporary man off from his roots in the past, by giving him free rein in the present to all his dreams of emancipation and to his passion for change, and by exalting the current moment and its immediate success without looking ahead to the future or providing for the good of future generations.

2. Economic democracy, therefore, knows nothing of the real vocation of political power. Because the common good does not exist for it – except in cases of international crisis or of phenomenal danger! It contests all sovereign public authority and excludes it from intervening in the life of the economy.

The democratic economy is radically destructive of the nation, of patriotism and of all civic sense unless it subjects them to the defence of economic interests. The democratic economy necessarily entails the disappearance of the sense of a nation’s true common good.

3. Yet it calls on the State! It multiplies the state’s interventions to the point where we have a system of total interventionism and until economic democracy is transformed into a regime of economic dictatorship, highly centralised and controlled. Such behaviour is always accompanied by the negation of political power as the supreme function of the nation’s government for the common good. In this system the State is no more than an agent of the economic system, at the service of the individual who is its exclusive centre of interest. The State is the all powerful and all-knowing pilot of economic growth, the strict administrator of individual and collective goods!

Under whatever guise it may take, economic democracy always entails the subjection of the public to the private, of the common well-being to particular interests, of the State to individuals, of politics to economics, to ego-nomics.